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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

How is this not slander? Making false claims to disrupt someone's business seems like the perfect case of slander and should be treated as a legal matter in my opinion.

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It might be, but at least in the US slander is rarely prosecuted criminally. That leaves civil action, but that's limited to how much damage the OP suffered as a result. Given that it's a small personal blog with little traffic/monetization, any legal costs will outweigh any winnings, if any.

It's more likely to be the tortious of interference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference ) but even then, the kicker for almost all non-criminal cases is that you have to have monetary damages or there's really nothing much you can do.

Now if net neutrality had teeth, maybe you could angle that way.

Because there is no _intent_ to slander.

Sure there is, they're a bigcorp and did what they did. Don't let companies get away with crimes you and I wouldn't just because they're too disorganized.

So if I send an email to your boss saying "occamrazor is a <blank> molester", I'm fine as long as I say that I didn't mean to cause any harm?

You're fine if you honestly thought it was true, yes.

am I also fine if I negligently write and keep using an algorithm to detect and report people for being molesters when I know full well that it's actually shitty and I regularly receive reports that it's resulting in false positives?

That's facebook's situation. Even though they've got hundreds of billions and could easily afford to, they don't want to pay humans to verify these things and they know that innocent people are being hurt by their terrible lazy code, they just don't care.

I suppose you'd have to prove that they knew the algorithm was bad. They'll just say "we're trying our best, but it's hard". And the truth is that it probably is hard. The question is whether knowing that your algorithm is imperfect is equivalent to intent to harm.

You are describing the actual malice standard which only applies to public figures. Also, an accusation of that type would be considered "defamation per se" which would mean that there is not a need to prove damages. According to my layman understanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actual_malice

https://www.findlaw.com/injury/torts-and-personal-injuries/w...

HN needs a button to "ask a professional" to resolve a question in a thread, be it a doctor, lawyer, accountant, physicist, or electrical engineer. ;]

Ah, that's a good point, thank you!

Depends on the legal jurisdiction. No intent required in England for example, just proof of serious harm

I believe that's a valid case. Especially since NYT is suing OpenAI on similar grounds.

i.e. if you want automated tools for "protection" than they need to "correct" 99.99999% of the time otherwise it's not worth it.

Facebook is doing it to protect their community, and disrupting your business is a sacrifice they are willing to make.

- "disrupt someone's business"

It's a personal blog (which didn't even go down), so the damages are zero or negligible.

And it's probably not defamatory at all, because the bar for what's "reckless disregard" for truthfulness is quite high. "We run a commercial service that identifies malicious websites and 0.01% of them are unintentionally false positives" is not gross negligence.

edit: (To defend myself because I'm getting piled on in votes)—I agree that this shitty behavior, but I just don't agree that there is or should be a legal remedy for it. You all have way too heated hot takes, HN. There's no life-changing injuries here for which five-figure attorneys would be a proportionate investment—this is, no offense, just some blog which did not go down, and everyone will have forgotten all about this by Monday. This is just not the kind of conflict the legal system is meant to resolve!

Let's not downplay it, the damages are reputational - not (necessarily) financial. They were falsely accused of engaging in criminal activity in the hopes of getting their services provider to terminate their relationship with the author.

This trend of hiding behind algorithms and percentage figures needs to stop, yesterday.

- "the damages are reputational"

I don't see any tangible reputational damages here. No one seems to have read this except Digital Ocean (?)

- "They were falsely accused of engaging in criminal activity"

And Netcraft sincerely believed that this was a criminal-activity website. That is not libel! Untrue statements without malice (or a very severe amount of negligence) are not defamatory in the US. You are allowed to accuse people of things—that is protected speech.

> No one seems to have read this except Digital Ocean

And that matters how? Digital Ocean read the complaint and acted on it, so the reputational damage occurred.

You don't have to make a public article to damage someone's reputation privately.

- "Digital Ocean read the complaint and acted on it, so the reputational damage occurred."

How much damages is that, in your opinion? How much would OP need to paid to be made whole?

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